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Autosave is really annoying

oliverfarren
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I’m not sure if there’s something unique about my experience here but I wanted to feedback my frustration about the autosave feature and also understand if it’s a shared or not shared sentiment.

There’s been a number of times now when making changes to the Typeform i’ll have an oops moment and want to undo my change. But before I know it, the peaceful grey “Published” button has snapped to chaotic black with the words “Publish” threatening to commit my mistakes for all to see. No matter how much I press ctrl-z nothing un-changes. So i’m hopelessly left to manually, tediously, undo whatever mistakes i’ve made hoping not to make more mistakes along the way.

So often I’m left lamenting how nice it would be if there was some way (and if there is a way, that that way be made more obvious to locate) to revert any unpublished changes so I can avoid this trap. And It’s happened enough times now that I’m convinced I shouldn’t have to get better and that actually it would make more sense for Typeform to better accommodate me! :slight_smile:

If nothing else, please let me have a way of turning off autosave (Or if this can be done, make it more obvious how this can be done!) I’m sure for most people it’s great, for me it’s doing more harm and I resent not having the agency.

Thanks,

Oliver

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Best answer by john.desborough 14 July 2021, 22:36

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10 replies

Liz
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Hi @oliverfarren First, I appreciate that you said the publish button is a peaceful gray - I’ve never seen it called that ha! :grin: Makes form building sound so pleasant. 

I totally understand where you’re coming from with the autosave. We once previously had the option to turn autosave on/off, but then we found that customers were forgetting to save their forms entirely and thus, losing all their hard work. :sob:

If I’m guessing correctly, it seems like just have a simple undo button would solve a lot of problems, right? 

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
oliverfarren
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Hi Liz,

I’m glad you enjoyed my rhetoric :smile:

I see why having autosave always on might be the lesser of two evils then… When you had the autosave on/off option, was it off by default? Because if so, I’m wondering whether having back the autosave on/off option AND the default be that autosave is on, might be a winning compromise? Seems that way those who want it or don’t think about it, would have it by default and those like me who don’t want it, now have the option and are more responsible for the risks. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

An undo button might work... but to be clear, I’d want to undo any unpublished changes. I know I can (in theory) use ctrl+z to undo an action but I find that the ctrl+z isn’t always undoing what i’ve done.

Side note or alternative solution, it would actually be pretty cool if between publishing forms, each autosave was retained so as a user who’s made a mistake (or many mistakes!) I could just go back up the autosave stack to the point where my changes were good. Just a longer term idea though, i’ll take a fast solution that works over a comprehensive one that works better.

Thanks,

Oliver

 

 

Collecting data in style.
john.desborough
Userlevel 7
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@oliverfarren - i know this may sound old school and pedantic but that is what i am - old and teacher-like

i have had similar angst both at the entire form level as well as within questions so i have gone with old school solutions-ish:

  • when i publish a form and put it into production, i put a copy in a backups workspace calling it v1.0 and increment the number every time i make a change and republish/push to production
  • when i know i am going to tweak an existing form, i make a copy of the form in the current workspace and make the changes on the new one - keeping the prior version intact until i am ready to go into production 
  • when i am in a form and i want to make a change to a question, if i am not sure if i will be keeping the change in mind, i will actually duplicate the question in the form and modify the other/new version so that i can do some a/b-ish testing 
    • yes i want the ctrl-z option or something like that but.. 

this style won’t work for everyone but it works for me, to keep me from putzing around too much in a form and losing all the good things i wanted to keep - i have even inserted a slide at the beginning of a form that will make me go down an a or b path and replicated the entire structure of the quiz in parallel tracks so that i can mess about … - i have 7 other voices in my head who are free of caffeine dependency and can create lots of havoc, so i adopted some of the old methods we had to use in the early 80s with the first versions of Lotus, Visicalc and Excel, etc. and diskettes… 

</soapbox>

now Typeform, when are you going to get rollbacks in place? lol

 

des

If your third coffee of the day is not helping you with your Typeform, maybe we can help you find your answers...
Liz
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Userlevel 7
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Hi @oliverfarren That’s a good question. We had the feature pre-pandemic, so it’s hard to remember what it was like then. If I remember correctly, it mainly just confused people to have the option to turn it on/off, but that wasn’t the case for all! Some customers with similar situations like yours, really liked the feature. 

Either way, this feedback is handy! A Ctrl+Z option would be really handy to undo any published or unpublished changes. I’d also love a change history - I use a feature like that on my personal website and it’s come in SO handy. 

 

I’ll share this with our product team. :grin:

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
oliverfarren
Userlevel 2
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Thanks for your contribution @john.desborough , it’s always interesting to hear how others approach their work.

I agree it’s a good approach to keep versions and backups of the form. We currently keep versions the live form after large changes. I’ve recently been thinking about formalising this into a script using the Typeform-SDK so that this becomes gets reduced to a few button presses.

And so far that’s meant i’ve not (nor has the rest of the team) done anything disastrous. But just yesterday, I was updating the url redirect and only meant to alter a segment and instead ctrl+v’d the whole thing... removing the 9 hidden fields that had been carefully positioned :weary: … Did I back it up before making this change? No. It was supposed to be 2 second change. But I then had to spend a fair while reconstructing the full url all because  the changes had been auto-saved and I had no way of reverting back to the published state.

 

Thanks @Liz for taking the feedback onboard. I definitely appreciate i’m coming at this from one angle and what i’m suggesting may not be preferable for the common use-case. But I hope that it is.

Collecting data in style.
Liz
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Of course! If there are any updates, I’ll let you know here, too, @oliverfarren . :grin:

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
john.desborough
Userlevel 7
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@oliverfarren - all i can say is arrrrgghh.. (and that i have done the same…. ) it’s frustrating when something that simple can ruin an afternoon or keep you at the keyboard until 2am trying to fix it. 

i think at this point it all comes down to tool capability and discipline(s) - until the tool gives us what we want/need we have to discipline ourselves to work within the current set of ‘rules’ or constraints and make the best/most creative use of our elusive common sense. 

now if only adding more scotch to the glass would help us get better at typeforming, the world would be a more mellow place. 

thank YOU for continuing to contribute the community. it is appreciated

 

des

If your third coffee of the day is not helping you with your Typeform, maybe we can help you find your answers...
J

Why not have a “Revert” button that undoes everything since the last “Publish”?

Liz
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Userlevel 7
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Hi @JWC I can certainly share this suggestion to our product team. :grinning: Let us know if you think of any others!

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
B
Userlevel 1
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Please please can we have an undo function @Liz as you say “Ctrl+Z”. 

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